The Journey of Two Korean Churches

In the late 1990s, Charles Kim and Ken Choe got caught in a blizzard on the Continental Divide as they were returning from Grand Rapids, Mich., where they had attended a “boot camp” put on by Christian Reformed Home Missions (now Resonate Global Mission) for church planters.

At the “boot camp” they learned many things, including the nuts and bolts of how to gather people and bring them along to create a new CRC congregation.

Not on the agenda, of course, was how to best navigate slippery pavement or how to avoid jackknifed trucks in zero-visibility snowfall on a Colorado highway.

But Kim and Choe made it through the storm and went on to address other struggles — many as tough or tougher than a blizzard — in helping to form two churches that became part of the vanguard of Korean congregations joining the CRC in the late 1990s and 2000s — TtoKamsa Home Mission Church in Los Angeles, Calif., and All Nations Church in nearby Lake View Terrace, Calif.

“It was all part of a process for the two churches. We went through many challenges in finding our way as worshiping Korean communities in the CRC,” said Kim, who was a campus pastor at the time and is now Korean ministries leader for Resonate Global Mission.

Choe, who is now senior pastor of Ttokamsa, situated in a warehouse district near downtown Los Angeles, described it this way:

“I came to the church after serving as a missionary in the Philippines, and I saw the needs of the young Koreans coming from immigrant backgrounds,”

“I’m bicultural, which is a big asset for me because I believed God had a special plan for this generation. I also believed from the very start that a large portion of our budget would go to support people in Mongolia, the Philippines, China, and elsewhere,” said Choe.

Taken together, the stories of the Ttokamsa and All Nations churches — beginning in many ways with that 1990s “boot camp” and the friendship between Kim and Choe — reflect God’s Spirit at work in powerful ways in two churches with similar roots and visions — churches that played a role in shaping and inspiring the growth of other Korean CRCs.

Largely because of their commitment to both missions and prayer and their appreciation for the CRC, both of these churches have been sites for the CRC Prayer Summit and many other gatherings. In the last 20 years, their reach has been wide and the journeys packed with adventure, challenges, and always shaped by God’s grace — a grace that is great and has also come into the CRC through Korean congregations such as these.

A Look at the History

“When I began serving as a church developer for [Christian Reformed] Home Missions in 1998, there were maybe 40 Korean churches affiliated with the CRC,” said Tong Park, who retired a few years ago from his position. “Today there are about 120.”

Korean churches have been attracted by the CRC’s rich Reformed theology and even its immigrant background — a story of people coming from abroad and making lives in a new land.

Tong Park was instrumental in helping Kim and Choe navigate the challenges and tensions that came with helping to start Korean congregations that either began as CRC congregations or were already existing and joined the CRC.

Speaking about Ttokamsa, Park said a small group of business men had been meeting regularly and then joined with Choe to help form the church.

“Ken provided great leadership and vision. He helped to clarify what was needed going forward,” said Park. “He helped develop a simple vision for mission that worked wonderfully.”

In fact, both Ttokamsa and All Nations have from the start had a strong commitment to outreach — a commitment that has shown itself in how it has changed the lives of many people in their churches and touched people around the world with their mission efforts, said Park.

A Dark Night Leading to Faith

It was pitch black as Brian Park tried to sleep on the floor of a small school in a mountain village on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Tense silence, beyond the occasional sounds of jungle animals, filled the night.

The village was mostly Muslim, and Park, along with a few other short-term lay missionaries from Ttokamsa, were there to work with elementary school children. They hoped to help ready the children to attend a Christian school located near the base of the mountain in the city of Cagayan de Or, a school that Ttokamsa had helped to get set up and running.

While the days were long and filled with activity, the nights presented unseen challenges. Rumors persisted that some Muslims in the area didn’t want the Christians in their village. So, said Park, they asked a few of the young people with whom they were working to guard the school at night.

“Its was not easy. It was scary. But as missionaries for our church, we choose to go to places where no one else goes,” said Brian Park, who runs his own small manufacturing facility in Los Angeles.

“We are like special forces. We take only two pairs of shorts, two T-shirts, our passports, and a few other necessities when we go,” said Park, who recalls once having to jump out of a window when people in a community came after the Christian lay missionaries who were working there.

“When we are on a field, we touch people’s hearts with the gospel, and we see them change, even though we always strictly follow the local rules when we do our work and don’t openly evangelize,” he said.

Park, who grew up in a Buddhist family, was living a hard life without any sense of God before he got connected to a church, which opened his mind to spiritual possibilities — and then several years ago he started to attend Ttokamsa, drawn there by the testimony of a friend who had been on a mission trip.

“My faith started on the mission field,” he said. “I saw Jesus at work in the people I went with and the people we were there for,” said Park. “Many of us are CEOs and presidents of our companies, but we roll up our sleeves and are not afraid to work.”

Eventually children in that mountaintop village in the Philippines got the permission from local Muslim leaders to travel down the mountain to attend the Cagayan Global Hope Mission School.

“Already kids have graduated from the school and gone to college and are coming back to help others in their village,” said Park.

Park is one of dozens of church members who became involved in short-term missions — doing work that ranged from teaching to building to providing health assistance — over the years in countries such as the Philippines, Afghanistan, China, and Guatemala.

“In many ways, Korean people came to the U.S. for the American dream, but when they came to our church and got involved in missions, they found something else. They found God,” said Ron Chu, outreach pastor at Ttokamsa.

Chu added that he came on board a year or so ago to start focusing the church on more local ministries.

All Nations Pastor Learns from First Nations People

Tae Kim, now senior pastor of All Nations CRC in Lake Terrace, Calif., has been involved with the church since its early years, when its founding pastor Jin Soo Yu decided to link with a ministry in which Charles Kim was involved and to join the CRC.

But Tae Kim wasn’t serving All Nations for very long when the growing Korean church sent him off to serve as a First Nations missionary pastor for a CRC congregation in British Columbia.

“I learned a lot about teamwork and about the lives of First Nations people. I learned things about bridging the gap between the older and younger generations. I also learned about how the Holy Spirit works in the life of a leader and the need to be flexible.”

While Ttokamsa Home Mission Church began with focusing mainly on international outreach — for instance, bringing food and relief to Pakistan after the devastating earthquake there in 2015 — All Nations has stayed, in general, closer to home — focusing its outreach on the North American continent.

Yu, the founding pastor, for many years traveled every Saturday night to a jail in Tijuana, Mexico, to minister to prisoners. The church also developed a seminary in Juarez, Mexico.

At the same time, All Nations members have done outreach in many countries in Latin America and beyond.

Like Ttokamsa, with Ron Chu serving as local outreach pastor, All Nations is today also paying closer attention to nurturing and developing its own members and local community, said Kim.

“We are in many ways a typical first-generation immigrant church that is now reaching out to embrace the second generation,” he said.

“I am very grateful as I look to the future, because working with our partners is a huge thing,” he said. “I would love to see Latino leaders rise up from our seminary.

“We also want to work with planting ethnic churches with Resonate Global Mission, just as Home Missions partnered with us when we began.”

At Ttokamsa: Sensing the Heart of God

Following a celebration of the Lord’s Supper at a service for young people, Rev. Ken Choe circulated through the room, stopping here and there to put his hands on the shoulders of worshipers and to pray for them. Some prayed along with him.

Earlier he had also led the All Nations morning service. His sermon in each instance was filled with folk stories, such as one about a young girl who coveted red shoes but ran into trouble when she got them. She wouldn’t take them off — and then they stayed on for good.

Temptations, Choe said, are “designed by the devil to destroy us, to cause us to sin. . . . We need to keep our eyes on Jesus, who said, ‘I came to give you life, and life in abundance.’”

Later in the day, Choe and Charles Kim sat down at a small restaurant near the church and reminisced about that long-ago “boot camp” and the gradual growth of Ttokamsa and All Nations from a handful of Korean immigrants to what they are today — large, active churches whose hearts have focused on reaching out to the world and yet are also seeing the need to reach people closer to home.

“We have been unleashing the power of the laity to the four corners of the world. The vitality has been there every year,” said Choe. “These were the Lord’s children in strange lands. They felt the sense and power of God’s call oversees.”

Today, the churches are turning some of that same attention to the struggling immigrant groups in the Los Angeles area. People from all over the world have flocked there in recent years, often escaping violence, poverty and persecution — and they are trying desperately to build new lives for themselves in the U.S.

“You can’t help seeing that the heart of God is crying over them,” said Choe. “They have been put into very extreme circumstances.”

Tears of Joy, Tears of Hope

Located on 17 acres in the foothills north of L.A., All Nations was founded in the heart of Lake View Terrace and has now become a megachurch of sorts, with a membership of about 2,000.

Across its campus are educational buildings, a large cafeteria, and meeting areas, including the sanctuary for worship, where a few people had gathered for a dawn prayer meeting.

It was a Monday morning. Soft music played in the dim sanctuary following a sermon by John Lee, the church’s missions pastor. The quiet was punctuated as people cried out to God, calling for God’s help and care as they looked ahead to the coming week.

As people filed out around 6 a.m, Lee strolled around the campus, lit by the rising sun. All Nations today, he said, has many buildings, many programs and ministries, and several plans for the future.

But Lee takes time on this mild morning in August to recall another time; he remembers the power of God that hit him when he was worshiping at All Nations in the late 1990s.

That was when the church often moved from place to place, from movie theaters to clubs to other venues in L.A.’s Koreatown. Lee was at all of those services, but he especially remembers the first one.

“I cannot forget how much I cried. That service was so touching. Everyone was so integrated. People came together in a powerful way in singing and prayer and worship,” he said.

As he compares the close-knit, prayer-focused quality of the church back then with the larger community now, he said All Nations is like many churches in North America that are today facing the challenges of demographic shifts and a growing trend of people, especially the young, turning away from organized congregational ministry.

“Things aren’t the same now — and for many reasons — in many of the churches that I visit,” he said.

But his hope and prayer is that churches will be able to retain and in some ways regain that kind of strong worship community, focused together on God, especially on Sunday mornings, as he experienced in the early years.

“I am fearful at times, with all of the changes, with how the [Christian] church is failing to attract young people, that the church won’t be there for the people.”

But then, he added, he has attended some lively, very cohesive services put on by churches focusing on the needs of young adults and has been impressed, as well as reminded of an important truth.

 “I realize it is not our church. God will bring renewal, making it not just a place to worship but also a true missional community.”

The Holy Spirit works in wondrous ways, Lee said, and he has seen that happen over the past 20 years at All Nations, renewing it time after time.

Perhaps the Spirit today, in this period of upheaval, is pushing churches that want to survive and thrive to think of things a little differently. And with Tae Kim charting a newer course involving many ministry partners for All Nations, he said, things look hopeful.

“I think we all have to realize that the church of Christ can no longer expect people to come to us,” said Lee. “God said ‘Go!’ and we’ve gone to foreign countries.”

But, he said, sweeping an arm around the campus, “we need to pay attention and allow the Spirit to work in our churches and in our homes here. We need to find ways to return to being a church in which we all feel welcome and in which we are welcoming others.”